Fiddling Monkeys!

Today is Clarence Darrow’s birthday. He defended both John Scopes in the famed Tennessee Monkey Trial and successfully kept Leopold and Loeb from getting the death penalty.

I laughed out loud this morning when I read this quote from Darrow: "I never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure."

Some days I know how he felt.

Our Town

Today is the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1897 and died in 1975. He's best known for writing Our Town (1938), a play about a woman who grows up in a small New England town, dies, and gets a chance to look back on her life and realize how much she failed to notice. How good that small life really was.

Our Town been my favorite play script for many years. I get it off of the shelf and read it every couple of years and always laugh and cry at the same spots. I've always wanted to play the role of the stage manager. One of the great roles in American theater.

I've also wondered for years why productions of this play, or at least any I've heard of, don't use live New England contra dance music for their background music. It seems like that music would do so much to reinforce the small-town "American-ness" of the script.

Maybe someday.

Why Computers Are Tools Of The Devil

Despite my best efforts at spyware-defeating software, virus scans, and firewalls, my computer at home got a virus or something and is now at the repair shop doing its impression of a door stop. I'm writing this on my work issued laptop before starting my wonderful and fulfilling work day.

At first I was pretty bothered by the home computer crash, since all of my lesson plans and tab for both my dulcimer students as well as some notes for a new dulcimer book I'm working on are all on the hard drive. Fortunately, I've got most of that stuff backed up on CDs, so it's not a total loss.

On the positive side, it was a beautiful weekend! And since I didn't have any reason to sit in front of the computer I spent time bicycling and sitting outside playing music.

Dan, Colleen W. and I spent time working on some new material for the Hot Baloney Boys on the porch over at her place and drew a nice crowd of neighbors.

All in all, I think my life was better this weekend without the computer. Maybe I'll keep it that way.

It's Muddy Waters' Birthday!

Born April 4, 1913 (or 15) in Issaquena County, Mississippi

Passed April 30, 1983

Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) was instrumental in bringing the sound of the delta to Chicago and transforming it into the electric blues that we know today. I can't imagine my teenage years without Muddy's music.

When others of my peers were listening to Led Zepplin, or the Rolling Stones, I was being called by the sources of the music.

Even today, twenty-five years after his passing and forty years or so since I first heard this stuff, when I hear Muddy's recordings of "Mannish Boy" or "I Can't Be Satisfied" I get a chill.

Get your mojo workin'!

Best Joke I've Heard This Week

Thanks to Rich Hibbs for this at last nights' old-time session:

Fork says to Spoon, "Who was that ladle I saw you with last night?"
Spoon: "That was no ladle, that was my knife!"

It's been that kind of week.